


Crack Open Hell

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hope vs. Despair, Hopeful Ending, Loss, Love, Sad, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-13 15:49:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17490821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: Their friend is lost. They'll crack open hell to get him back.





	Crack Open Hell

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo... Charmed is back tonight. I'm just a little bit extremely excited, how about y'all?

When the lump gathers in her throat, when it threatens to squeeze out of her mouth in a tearing scream that will never end, she remembers a time when he was there for her...

They had just lost an innocent that they were bound to protect. They had just lost an innocent and shit was… not good. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and, well, it sucked every time in different ways but this was a particularly hard one to process. Most innocents with enough power and potential to attract demons were old enough to fend for themselves, or at least to understand the danger they were in. Lupita had been six, barely old enough to understand that she was a different person from her mother. 

Macy sat up in bed, squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. She did not like what she saw when they were closed. The girl, so young with huge, dark eyes and a mass of curls spilling all around her baby doll face, had been so sweet, so accepting of their love and help, so… alive. Her little hand had felt so warm and right in Macy’s. And now?

She was dead, and Macy was certain that it was her fault. She had not read the signs, not marked the presence of a predator, and the last moments of sweet Lupita’s life had been a red, gruesome blur. When she finally found them, after Lupita had trotted into the darkness after a toy that only she could see, it was over. The hepedopophagus had looked up from its prey, snarled and returned to ripping in the child’s flayed open abdomen for the liver that it apparently needed to survive.

It was dead, now. Macy had torn it limb from limb with an evolution of her power’s brought about by exteme stress, could even now hear the gristly tendons pop as they disarticulated. She was certain that she would never forget what it had sounded like, what the whole scene looked like, and Lupita’s wide, staring dark eyes. She could not forget because, if she did, she might let it happen again.

A soft hand knocked at the door. “Can you spare a moment?”

Harry. “Come in,” she said.

He did, bumping the door open with his hip and balancing a tray in the crook of his arm. On it were two delicate china cups and a steaming tea pot. “I thought a spot of tea might fortify you.”

She frowned. “Is tea really the best cure for what I’m pretty sure is gonna eventually be a raging case of post traumatic stress disorder?”

“I am British, Miss Vaughn,” he said. “We consider tea a cure for almost everything from a dreary afternoon--of which we have at least three hundred and sixty six per year in spite of there being only three hundred and sixty five days--to a quadruple amputation. I’m even relatively certain that we give it intravenously during a cardiac arrest instead of epinephrine.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “If it’s that good then I’ll have to give it a try.” She inhaled deeply. “It smells good. What kind is it?”

“Earl Grey.” He set the tray on her nightstand. “The bergamot oil in it is a trifle bitter but that’s what gives the tea its body, its… savor, perhaps. Much like life, you could say.”

“You’re a great white lighter,” she said, “but not much of a philosopher.”

He sat beside her. She was amazed at how light he seemed, how his weight barely made an indention on the bed. “Perhaps not much of a philosopher but I can write a pithy nothing with the best of them. I keep waiting for the folks from Hallmark to call but, thus far? Alas. My talent for greeting card wisdom has gone untapped.”  
He poured, first hers and then his, a perfect gentleman as always. She lifted the cup in two hands, careful because it was hot, and inhaled the steam curling off the deep, brown liquid. It smelled heavenly but when she took her first sip Macy ended up scrunching her face up in some little disgust. “Ugh, it is bitter.”

“That’s the savor!”

“Savor schmavor, I’m gonna need a couple of lumps of sugar.” He provided this from an intricately painted china bowl with silver tongs. She took another sip, a far more satisfying one this time, and asked, “Where did you get this set? The bowl and tongs and stuff. I know it didn’t come from this house--my mom seems to have been more of a chipped mugs and plain flatwear kinda gal. Is it from your past life?”

“Remember, Macy,” he told her, “I haven’t any memory of my past life.”

“From Fiona, then? Or something?”

The smile he offered was tight. “Or something, yes. Perhaps the dream of a memory, or the memory of a dream. It all gets very… furry around the edges.”

She noticed the change in his face, the stiffening of his voice, and let the matter drop. They sipped in companionable silence for a long few moments. Finally he set his cup down on the tra and spoke. “You’re going to lose them, you know.”

“Hmm?”

“Innocents. No matter how hard you try, nor how diligently you guard them, innocents in your care will be killed. That is the nature of the game we play, this oh so dangerous game.”

Macy felt tears threaten to spill from her eyes. “But she was just a baby, Harry. She was barely even old enough for school.”

“And did her age protect her from an untimely, gruesome death?”

“Obviously not.”

“Then take it to mean that what I said applies to her, too, in spite of her tender age. Innocents will die. You or one of your sisters may very well die, a thought that cuts me to the bone. Even one so charming and indispensible as myself might fall.” He paused to chuckle. “We soldiers fall, and so do civilians, but the war goes ever one.”

She shook her head. “War without end? That seems awful, Harry.”

“It is, perhaps,” he said, “but necessary. And in service to the greater good even, in its own way, beautiful… or if not beautiful then at least dignified. We stand firm and we do what we must. We dedicate and rededicate ourselves each day to what we must risk, what we must face.”

“That still seems kinda awful,” she said. “War without end.” She shuddered. “Even in the name of the greater good that sounds awful. What is the point of any of it, then? What’s the point of even living?”

“The point of living is as it ever was. We protect the ones we love and we bask in the glow of that love.”

His hand is close, beside the platter set with the teapot and their cups. She covered it with her own, enjoyed the warmth that flowed between them. His eyes, too, were warm and filled with an infinite, understanding sadness to mirror the worry that has lain on her since this responsibility fell on her shoulders. 

Now those eyes, and the rest of him, are trapped in a dark place that is far from home. And that’s not okay--in fact it sucks. Soldiers might fall, she thinks, but we go back for our fallen. That’s what makes us transcend what we are to reach for what we might become. Her Whitelighter, her friend, is lost to her. Macy Vaughn will crack open hell to bring him back.


End file.
